Tobey Maguire

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Fred Savage movie The Wizard hit theaters. For many '80s babies, this was required viewing – either to see a first glimpse of the yet-to-be-released Super Mario Bros. 3 or to see what the Wonder Years star looked like in contemporary clothes.

The Spoils of Babylon, premiering Thursday on IFC (10 p.m. ET/PT) and produced by Funny or Die, is more correctly titled – with a significant loss of magnificent pretentiousness – Eric Jonrosh's The Spoils of Babylon.

It also bills itself as an “epic television event,” but in truth boils down to a mere six half-hour episodes.

And although Babylonboasts a cast that starts somewhere in the A-list (Tobey Maguire, Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell), it stoops a little to accommodate a few highly respectable character actors (Tim Robbins, Michael Sheen). Then it improbably winds down to Haley Joel Osment, the former child star of The Sixth Sense, and Val Kilmer.

"There's only one person in this whole world like you," Fred Rogers liked to say on his long-running children's TV show. But now the difficult task begins of finding someone just like Mr. Rogers – or who can at least capture his essence – for an upcoming biopic.

A film about Rogers, who died in 2003 at age 74, is in the works at Treehouse Pictures based on a script by Alexis Jolly, a staff writer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Deadline.com reports.

After a two-year professional break to spend more time with his family, Tobey Maguire returns to the big screen by teaming up with his longtime pal Leonardo DiCaprio for director Baz Luhrmann's new 3D adaptation of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, opening May 10.

"We are like any other buddies. There's a lot of laughing and chatting between us," Maguire told PEOPLE at the film's New York City premiere on Wednesday. "We enjoy doing a lot of things we have in common, like basketball. We like to play and talk about basketball."

Best friends for nearly 25 years, Maguire, 37, and DiCaprio, 38, first met in 1990 during the casting for Parenthood, a one-season TV spin-off series based on director Ron Howard's movie starring Steve Martin (before it was revived for TV – successfully – in 2010). At the time, DiCaprio landed the lead teen role, while Maguire was handed only a couple of lines.